Devoted to tips and other info on how to use your Mac to read and write languages other than English

Friday, May 18, 2007

Support for Indian Languages

Of the 13 most widely spoken languages of India, OS X comes with built-in support for 6 of them via its Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Tamil fonts and keyboards. You can find info on support for another three (Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam) in my earlier note here. Below is info on using the remaining 4 -- Bengali, Urdu, Oriya, and Assamese.

For Bangla/Bengali, you can download OS X fonts and keyboard layout from this site. The Bengali script is also used for Assamese.

For Urdu, OS X comes with the required Arabic script font, but you need to install a keyboard layout. One can be obtained here or from my iDisk.

For Oriya, you will need to download a font like Utkal listed at this site. Correct display is only possible in OpenOffice/X11. A (very) expermental keyboard layout is on my iDisk.

The Hindi font (Devanagari) which comes with Leopard has no Italic and Bold Italic versions. There are other excellent Unicode Hindi fonts availabe, but Leopard can't use them properly. Is there a way to use these fonts?

Tom, you said, "OS X comes with built-in support for 6 of them via its Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Tamil fonts and keyboards. You can find info on support for another three (Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam)."

I see no such thing when I go to System Preferences > International > Language > Edit List to edit the language set list. I do not see ANY of these. I'm running 10.5.4. What's going on? Thanks!

Stephanie -- You will find the support in the form of keyboard layouts in system prefs/international/input menu. If you do not see keyboards for those languages there, let me know (tom at bluesky dot org). Also you will find fonts for those languages in Library/Fonts as indicated on this list:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1642

The Tamil font is Inaimathi

These languages are also in the language list, but written in their own script, so they might not be easy to recognize. If you mouse over them, the name should appear in English.

I am using Mac OSX 10.4.11 and have been trying to type some Sanskrit prayers with Devanagari (Querty). I am having some success. I've got the Devanagari (querty) keyboard on my screen but can someone please tell me how to do the following:1) how do I get the aspirated letters like bh, gh, dh2) other letters also I can’t find like the other sh that is used in Shiva or the other n or the vowel r that would be used to spell Krishna. What is the procedure for those letters?3) words beginning with a vowel like Upanishad. Is there a way to get the letter U by itself.4)how do I get the visarga as in namah5) how do I get the bindi?If someone can help me with this I would be really grateful. Thanks!Regards,Kelly McCabe in Flagstaff

The Oriya keyboard layout does not seem to produce conjunct consonants the way the Devanagari one does, e.g. ञ्च, श्र, त्र and so on. Is this because the unicode subset for Oriya does not include these characters, or because they keyboard layout is not configured to use them?

Nikhil -- Unicode does not encode conjuncts and keyboards are not relevant. The problem is the font, which is supposed to make the conjuncts automatically. There is no font for OS X yet. Windows fonts may work if you are using Open Office 2/X11 (not OpenOffice 3).

I don't completely understand. The Devanagari conjuncts seem to be a part of Unicode because you don't have to have a particular font installed on your computer to use them. It looks to me like I can type Devanagari using any font on my Mac. Are you saying the Oriya Unicode subset as it is, has the capability of producing Oriya conjuncts if the correct font is used?

Nikhi -- Correct Devanagari can only be made on a Mac with one font, the one that comes with OS X called Devanagari MT. There are no Devanagari conjuncts in Unicode. You can see that from the Unicode character charts. You might want to look at

http://unicode.org/faq/indic.html

Yes, a correct Mac Unicode Oriya font will produce conjuncts even though there are no Unicode codepoints for them. The same happens with Devanagari.

Oh, I see. So why are people who use Windows or don't have Devanagari MT installed on their computer able to properly see the Devanagari conjuncts I use in my emails, webpages, and even Google chat? There must be something universal about the conjuncts, right?

Nikhil -- All Macs have Devanagari MT installed. All WIndows machines in recent years have a Windows Devanagari font (called Mangal I think) installed which also makes conjuncts automatically. All platforms follow the same Unicode model. Some mobile devices do not yet have the correct font and cannot display conjuncts -- for example the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.

Do you know how I can get the Devanagri Font on Mac OSX 10.7.5 to display conjuncts correctly in Microsoft Word 2011?

I think I need to enable complex text formatting on the Mac or in Word but I don't see a way to do that.

The Devanagri conjuncts displayed perfectly on the PC in Word but when I opened the same document on my new Mac in Word, the conjuncts were lost. The characters display just fine other than that. Each individual letter shows up.